“Purple Feet! We’ll impress you with our wine prices!” answered a young female voice.
When I asked for Mrs. Newcastle, she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Aurora won’t be back till tomorrow. Or is it the next day? No, I think it’s tomorrow.”
“Back from where?”
“The cruise. I think they’re in the Bahamas. Or is it the Caymans?”
I thanked her, hung up, and tried to convince myself that I could legitimately bill Melissa Lloyd for a trip to the Cayman Islands to track down Aurora Newcastle. I had a new bikini I’d optimistically bought at the beginning of the summer and never gotten a chance to wear . . .
The phone rang. An angry Brian Yukawa, owner of Buff Burgers, yelled on a crackly cell phone connection. Traffic noise in the background made it hard to hear. “Charlie! I just got a call from the police, something about a disturbance at my restaurant on Powers. My phone cut out before I could get it all. I’m stuck in traffic up in Denver and can’t get hold of my manager. The police were saying something about an ambulance and a private eye—”
His cell phone went dead again. Not stopping to try to call him back, I grabbed my purse and bolted for the door, my mind conjuring awful images. An ambulance! Who was hurt? I’d given the gun back to Gigi Monday afternoon, telling her to take it home, lock it in a safe, and leave it there. Surely she couldn’t have taken it to Buff Burgers with her this morning? Maybe someone had wrestled it away from her and she’d been shot. A twinge of guilt goosed me into the car. I fought traffic up Academy Boulevard to Hwy 83 and turned right onto Briargate Parkway. Exceeding the speed limit by a hefty margin, I headed east until I hit Powers and then swung north to the new shopping area where the Buff Burgers sat near a Target and a Petco.
Chaos met my eyes. Traffic was snarled at the intersection as drivers gawked at the two police cars, one fire truck, and an ambulance blocking the drive-through lane of the Buff Burgers. Patrons roamed the parking lot. Black smoke roiled from the rear door and drive-through window. Firefighters played a hose over the building. The stench of burning rubber mixed strangely with the smell of french fries. A uniformed cop had a buffalo by the shoulder as an EMT tended to a nearby man stretched out under the shade of the only tree in sight. Pulling onto the median, I abandoned my car and forded the unmoving lanes of traffic.
“Charlie!” the buffalo squawked.
Oh. My. God. It was Gigi in the buffalo getup, beckoning me over with one hand—hoof? My steps dragged as I approached, and my anger mounted. Now that I knew she wasn’t shot or otherwise injured, I let fury rise up at the thought of lawsuits directed against Swift Investigations. I’d lose Brian’s business. The entire CSPD would be laughing at me.
I showed my business card to the cop (since Colorado doesn’t license investigators, I had nothing more official to present), an Officer Venetti, and he said, “The buffalo says she’s working with you, ma’am?”
“Bison,” Gigi said.
When the cop and I gave her uncomprehending stares, she said, “I’m really a bison, not a buffalo.”
I glared at her and asked the officer, “Is she being charged with anything?”
He shrugged and passed a hand over curly black hair. “Don’t know yet, ma’am. We’re still sorting it out. There’s talk of arson, assault, inciting a riot . . . I don’t know what all. The detectives aren’t here yet.”
“What the hell happened?” I asked Gigi, half thinking the cop would stop me. He didn’t. “And take that goddamned buffa—bison head off so I can talk to you.”
“I can’t,” she wailed. “It’s stuck.”
“Here. You push and I’ll pull,” I said. “Bend down.”
Gigi obeyed, and I grabbed hold of her horns, tugging with all my might as she pushed at the animal’s lower jaw. Officer Venetti motioned to a fellow cop, and they both watched, amused looks on their faces. Just as I was starting to think we’d need a circular saw or a hammer, the head popped off and I fell on my ass, holding one curved horn as the rest of the head rolled a few feet and stopped. Two small children standing nearby burst into tears. “She killed Bernie!”
Their mother coaxed them away with promises of ice cream, and I figured Buff Burgers had lost their business permanently to some fast food joint that didn’t behead large mammals in its parking lot. The cops doubled over, roaring with laughter as I stood up, holding the plastic horn like a dagger. I wasn’t sure who to plunge it in first. I fought the urge to rub my tailbone, feeling the jolt all the way up my spine and into my head.
Gigi, plump cheeks flushed red, ash blond hair flattened to her scalp on one side and standing out in a winglike formation on the other, perspiration dripping down her temples, looked at me with trepidation. I closed my eyes and took three slow breaths.
“What happened?” I forced my hand open and let the horn fall to the ground before I committed a felony.
“Well, when I got up this morning, I—”
I held up one hand in a stop signal. “This. Explain this.” I gestured to the burning restaurant, the ambulance, the cops.
“Um, well, I was getting the hang of being Bernie and really kind of liking it—the children were so sweet—except it was really hot. So I went into the back to get an iced tea and get to know the kids who work here, like you said. I’m the oldest employee by a good thirty-five years, I think. Anyway, while I was chatting, I kept an eye on the business at the counter, you know, the cash registers and stuff. And after a while I realized that Jody”—she pointed to the teen now sitting beneath the aspen tree, a Band-Aid on his forehead—“wasn’t ringing everything up. When a customer would place the order, he’d ring up the burger and fries or whatever, you know, the stuff that one of the kitchen workers got ready, but he didn’t ring up the drinks or cookies or stuff he could get himself. He’d charge the customer the full amount, and I’m sure that at the end of the shift, he’d pocket the difference.”
“She’s lying!” Jody growled. In his Buff Burgers uniform, he looked like a skinny pioneer who’d gone one too many rounds with the Indians. Two buttons were torn off his shirt, and his coonskin cap hung askew, showing lank brown hair. The EMT was binding a nasty burn on his hand.
“He must be really good at math to be able to do that,” Gigi added, an admiring note in her voice. “I noticed most of these kids couldn’t give you change for a dollar if you bought a fifty-cent Junior Bernie Moose Froth Non-Dairy Dessert.”
“I’m not. She’s crazy. She attacked me!”
“I didn’t!” Gigi’s eyes welled up, but she firmed her mouth into a determined line. “I merely went over to talk to him, to tell him what I’d noticed, encourage him to do the honest thing.”
I rolled my eyes at her naïveté. “What happened then?”
“He grabbed a basket of fries from the frying well and flung them at me!” Gigi’s voice climbed higher. “He ruined my Bernie costume.” She pointed to the large grease splotches staining the costume. “Some of the oil landed on the ranges, and it started smoking. Next thing I knew, you couldn’t see anything and people were screaming and running and—”
“Bernie saved my life,” put in a new voice. I turned to see a teenaged girl wearing a Buff Burgers uniform, her raven hair in braids. She looked like Pocahontas wearing pink Crocs. “I got turned around in the smoke and started to choke—I have asthma.” She pulled out an inhaler to prove it. “She came after me and pulled me out of there.”
I glanced over at Officer Venetti, glad to see he’d conquered his laughing fit enough to start taking notes.
“That’s great . . .”
“Caitlyn. Caitlyn Carruthers,” she supplied.
“I didn’t assault him,” Gigi put in. “I had to butt him to make sure he didn’t run off.” She lowered her head and made a motion like a charging buffalo. “I only knocked him on his keister.”
A tiny seed of hope that Swift Investigations was not ruined sprouted. If Caitlyn would tell her story to the reporters I saw crowding into the parking lot i
n their antenna-topped vans, and no one filed charges—
“You assaulted me. My dad’s going to sue your butt back to the Stone Age, Grandma,” Jody said, getting shakily to his feet. “I hope those orange prison jumpsuits come in extra-large, buffalo breath.”
Wow, that boy had a real mouth on him and knew how to aim for the jugular. He’d hold his own in juvie until he mouthed off to a bigger kid with a shiv.
Gigi gasped in outrage. “Bison! And I’m not a grandma. I couldn’t be . . .” She paused, doing some mental math. “Well, I’m not. And a size fourteen is not an extra-large, and you’re . . . you’re nothing but a rude, incompetent thief!”
“I am not! I got away with more than four hundred—” He cut himself off as he realized what he was saying. Twisting out of the EMT’s grasp, he hobbled away from the restaurant.
“Yea, Bernie!” someone yelled. I heard a spattering of applause as Officer Venetti trotted after Jody, handcuffs in hand. Looking around, I saw that most of the audience wore Buff Burgers uniforms. Jody clearly wasn’t in the running for Mr. Congeniality.
As Venetti led Jody, arms cuffed behind his back, over to a police car, I asked Gigi, “Why’d you ever decide to confront that delinquent on your own?”
She used her tail to dab at the sweat running down her forehead and widened her eyes at me. “Well, you said to wing it.”
The media and police consumed most of the rest of the afternoon. A young reporter interviewed Gigi in her one-horned buffalo head after Caitlyn told everyone about “Bernie’s” heroics. Exactly fourteen seconds of the interview made the local news. The anchors snickered in the studio as the reporter summed up, “What a moooving tale! Back to you, Jed.” It was almost enough to make me heave, but Brian Yukawa was so pleased with the free publicity for Buff Burgers that he and I came to an agreement on our own that didn’t involve our lawyers. I waived Swift Investigations’ fee, and Brian agreed to take care of the restaurant damages, most of which were from smoke and water. I offered to replace the stained and ruined Bernie costume, but he laughed it off, saying they had plenty of others in storage somewhere. Gigi brought Bernie’s head back to the office and propped it behind her desk, a massive trophy. It gave off an unpleasant odor of rancid grease, smoke, singed plastic, and french fries, but I didn’t have the heart to banish it. Maybe if we got it dry-cleaned and mounted, glued the horn back on . . .
What was I thinking? I’d give it to Gigi as a going-away present, because surely she wouldn’t want to continue working here after the day’s traumas. On that hugely satisfying thought I locked up and headed for home, having persuaded Gigi to leave early. “You deserve some time off. And a long shower,” I’d told her.
As for me, I deserved a long soak in my hot tub, but only after I got some gardening done. Stripping off my navy slacks and pin-striped blouse when I got home, I estimated I had two hours to work before it got dark. Weeds were poking their presumptuous heads up in one of my rock borders, and I needed to mulch some shrubs before we got the first hard frost, which could be any day now that we were on the cusp of September. Wearing faded orange running shorts and an old Hard Rock Café T-shirt, I descended the steps from my deck to the yard. The scent of pine met me, and I breathed it in, feeling the tension drain from me.
I dragged a forty-pound bag of mulch from the small shed at the back of the property and started tamping it into place beneath my barberry bushes and lavender, taking care to avoid the barberry’s inch-long spines. The musty cedar smell made me sneeze, but I liked it. The pull in the muscles of my back and shoulders felt good, and I went through three bags of mulch before straightening. With a hand at my waist, I arched back.
“Must’ve been a hard day,” said a familiar voice from behind me.
I turned to see Father Dan, still in black shirt, clerical collar, and gray slacks, observing me from the hillock that separates my property from the church’s. The last of the sun’s fingers played over his rugged features and struck sparks from his blond hair. It glinted on a beer can as he raised it to drink.
“How’d you know?” I smiled, glad to see him, and bent to yank a dandelion from a river rock border.
“You always end up in the yard after you’ve had a particularly tough day. You missed one,” he added, using the can to point at a weed. “Why don’t you just let nature take its course?”
“That would be admitting defeat,” I said, only half joking. “Xeriscape is a compromise between the gardener and nature in Colorado,” I told him. I gestured at the area behind my house. “I get to impose a pattern, some colors, on my yard, and the weather can’t ruin all my efforts by refusing to rain, because most of the plants need very little water and a lot of the texture comes from rocks and stuff.”
“So you win?” Father Dan asked with a grin. He crumpled the beer can in one large hand.
“Absolutely.”
“That attitude’ll only make nature try harder.”
“She can bring it on.” I stooped to pull some more weeds from the border, stuffing them into a plastic bag. I cut a look up at him from under the bangs flopping in my eyes. “Well, don’t just stand there looking priestly, lend a hand.”
“Can’t. Vestry meeting in fifteen minutes. I’ll bring you a beer, though.”
“Slacker.”
He returned with a Sam Adams, and I decided to call it quits for the night. We settled cross-legged on the grass and drank our beers in companionable silence as the sun sank behind the mountain and shadows crept into the garden, coaxing the bunnies to come out and forage. I inhaled the hoppy smell of the beer and savored its cold bite as it slid down my throat. Um. The combination of the beer, peaceful silence, and hard work had lulled me half to sleep when Dan squeezed my shoulder and pushed himself to his feet.
“Meeting time.” He extended a hand, and I put mine in it, conscious of its warmth and strength as he pulled me up.
“Knock ’em dead.”
“Don’t think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind on occasion, especially when we’re talking about the budget.”
Showing him a shocked face, I waved as he strode back toward the church; then I headed for the deck and my hot tub. If any of Dan’s vestry members wandered this way they’d get a jolt, because I wasn’t going to bother with a swimsuit.
4
(Thursday)
No one, not even the bear, observed my skinny-dipping, and I set out for Denver the next morning feeling rested and rejuvenated. I was ninety-nine percent sure I’d seen the last of Gigi Goldman; I’d call her later to see if we could work out some sort of payment plan where I bought her out a little bit at a time over the next couple of years. Then I could hire the part-time assistant I really needed, someone to answer the phone, greet customers, and do some database research while I was in the field. It would all work as smoothly as my hooking up with Aurora Newcastle this morning. When I’d called Purple Feet again just after eight, a different clerk told me Mrs. Newcastle was expected by eleven. Unless traffic screwed me up, I’d be there on her heels.
Using my cell phone, I called Melissa Lloyd to update her and tell her I’d drop by her store that afternoon. With any luck, I’d have the name of her daughter by then. If she lived on the Front Range, maybe we’d be able to turn baby Olivia over to her sometime tomorrow. Melissa sounded tense—the baby wailing in the background might’ve had something to do with that—and agreed to remain at work until I showed up.
Most of the commuters were safely incarcerated in their soulless cubicles by now, and I traveled the fifty-odd miles to Denver in well under an hour, only slowing when I reached Park Meadows Mall on the outskirts of the city. Downtown’s skyscrapers loomed on the horizon, emerging from the prairie like stalagmites. Mountains to the west, snowcapped even at this time of year, made me prickle with ski fever. In another six weeks, maybe, some of the runs would open and I could spend my weekends rocketing down the runs. If I could afford lift tickets. The thought of my rocky finances and the bite Gigi would take out of
my bottom line brought my spirits down, and I finished the drive to LoDo in a gloomy mood made worse by the struggle to find a parking spot. Finally wedging my way into a spot just vacated by a Volkswagen Beetle, a good three blocks from my destination, I locked the doors and headed down Seventeenth Street to Purple Feet, the plastic bag containing the baby blanket bumping against my shin.
Purple neon outlined the store’s logo of grape-stained feet and made it easy to locate my destination between a boutique and a store selling collectible maps and prints. I considered the bikini in the boutique’s window for a moment, until I noticed the two scraps of fabric—not large enough to make a decent-sized dinner napkin—were priced at four hundred dollars. Eep. I pushed through the smoked-glass doors of Purple Feet and found myself in a hushed atmosphere reminiscent of a library or a cathedral, but with a heady scent far removed from dusty books and hymnals. Bottles of wine stacked in crates, arranged in sale barrels, and chilling in glass-fronted refrigerator cases took up every available inch of floor space. The price of the first bottle I looked at would’ve bought me half of the bikini. The Lower Downtown district was too rich for my blood.
“Are you here for the tasting?” A woman in a gray linen dress and a headscarf tied into a mini turban of pearl, lavender, and turquoise paisley that completely covered her hair approached me. “It doesn’t start for another half hour, but I just opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc to train the staff”—she gestured to a man and a woman wearing lavender polo shirts with the Purple Feet logo on their chests—“and you’re welcome to try it. Here.”
She handed me a stemmed glass with an inch of pale yellow wine in the bottom and filled glasses for herself and the two clerks. Following their lead, I swirled my glass and peered at the liquid as if it might be the cure for AIDS.
Swift Justice: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Books) Page 4